Inspired by a number of Five Things posts, many of which Dan Hon has catalogued; there are some great ideas across numerous disciplines in those linked posts; ours are all very webby.
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Mobile: while it’s been on our radar for a long time, the Australian market’s never had a lot of demand for mobile web; Apple and the iPhone have helped push through the idea of the mobile web as a stripped down version of the “real” web, so we’re eagerly experimenting with our options there; curiously, at the same time, we’re seeing huge opportunities in China where some 500 million people use mobiles more than they use PCs, but are stuck with tiny and slow devices, so it’s back to WAP and the stripped-down web to support that market
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HTML5: between Google’s HTML5 Playground and HTML5 Boilerplate, the collection of technologies under the HTML5 umbrella are suddenly becoming more widely usable, and reaching that point where we can integrate them into our day-to-day work
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Open Gov: we’re in a sort of limbo while the Australian government is headless, but recent developments, including AGIMO’s Declaration, around the key principles of Informing, Engaging, Participating, are very encouraging; will be interesting to see whether a new government and minister can run with it after Lindsay Tanner’s departure though; there’s some particularly thoughtful discussion going on around the role the public service plays in this, see Nick Gruen’s Those ‘crazy’ public servants’
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Scaling: we’re experimenting with different scaling solutions on a few different fronts, with interesting things being done with caching of generated web pages, or of data or indexes, and experimenting with both scaling up and out — we’re really liking the idea of throwing very specific hardware at particular tasks, so those CPU intensive tasks can be farmed out to fast hardware where it won’t interrupt regular service; the favourite approach we’re coming back to is faking it — making things almost live rather than actually live
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Things On The Front Page Of A University Website
Applies, of course, to a lot more than just university websites, but it takes a lot of discipline to actually implement.
